USA Today, which set off a publishing nuke, the impact of which still reverberates across the industry 28 years later, is undertaking the most significant overhaul of its format and strategy in its history. The Gannett Flagship is the scrapping of its traditional four-part organization (News, Sports, Money, Life) in favor of a cluster of 13 “content rings” that will produce information for distribution in both print and digital format. The rings will include Your Life, Travel, Breaking News, Investigative, Washington/Economy, Tech, and Auto, among others, paidContent.org reported. The company said the new organization is designed to address the growing importance of smart phones and tablets as delivery vehicles and potential sources of subscription revenue. About 130 staffers, or 9% of the workforce, will lose their jobs in the reshuffling.

An executive reorganization puts former life section editor Susan Weiss in charge of content. According to a slide presentation obtained by the Associated Press, Weiss will have a “collaborative relationship” with the paper’s vice president of business development. The presentation said the restructuring will “usher in a new way of doing business that aligns sales efforts with the content we produce.” The statement is already raising eyebrows by publishing pundits who fear that the deteriorating business situation in American newspapers will force editorial departments to become handmaidens of sales operations. Publisher Dave Hunke and editor Editor John Hillkirk said nothing will interfere with the paper’s commitment to independent journalism. However, as paidContent wryly put it, “While this doesn’t necessarily mean a complete demolition of the “Chinese Wall” that traditionally exists at established news organizations, it certainly sounds like it will be little more than a nylon curtain.”

Publishing executives would be wise to closely watch USA Today‘s moves. While the paper has long been derided as a journalism lightweight, it has a history of innovation in adapting to changing audience tastes. Many publishing veterans sniffed at USA Today in the early days, believing its formula of short stories without jumps, large infographics and generous use of color represented a dumbing down of news. A few years later, nearly all of them had adapted the same style. In the years since, USA Today has solidly established itself as a national institution with a readership of more than 1.8 million.

It’s particularly interesting that USA Today has made such a public commitment to harmonizing its editorial and advertising operations. This is a bitter pill for traditionalists to swallow, but a necessary one if professional news organizations are to thrive in the future. We believe that win-win solutions are possible when creative minds seek them. Few have done so to this point, and USA Today‘s strategy shift shouldn’t be dismissed until it’s had a chance to work.

Miscellany

Former Walt Disney Co. CEO Michael Eisner is among the candidates to take over the bankrupt Tribune Co. once it emerges from Chapter 11 reorganization. Eisner confirmed speculation that he is a candidate for the top job in a Variety interview this week. Jeff Shell, a former News Corp. cable executive who’s now with Comcast, is being considered for the CEO slot. Presumably, that means Eisner would be chairman. In the Variety interview, Eisner expressed support for paywalls. “The salvation of the newspaper is some kind of pay arrangement [online], which will evolve into something significant,” he said. The Tribune may actually be a bargain. Romenesko got hold of a memo stating that Tribune Co. has $1.6 billion in cash and generated $18 million more in cash flow in July than in the same month last year.

Newspapers as we know them will be irrelevant in a decade, at least in Australia, digital media consultant Ross Dawson told the Australian Newspaper Publishers’ Association yesterday. Or at least that’s what he told Editor & Publisher he planned to say earlier in the week. Dawson, who is considered a media seer Down Under, said the publishing platform of the future will be iPads and their derivatives, which will fall in price so much that they’ll be given away free within a few years. By that time, news organizations will be earning serious revenue from subscriber dollars. But they’d better not get comfortable. Media revenues will soar, but “established media organizations will need to reinvent themselves to participate in that growth.”

The financially troubled Washington Times is reportedly being sold to News World Media Development, which is affiliated with the Unification Church, which owns the Times. The conservative daily, which claims a circulation of 40,000, has cut its staff by 40% in a desperate effort to stay afloat. Executive Editor Sam Dealey called the impending sale a “welcome development.”
Add the Waco Tribune-Herald to the growing list of metro dailies that are putting up paywalls. Beginning Sept. 15, non-print subscribes will have to pay $9.95 per month, or $1.99 for a 24-hour pass to WacoTrib.com. We had a chance to work with a couple of the top editors from WacoTrib last summer and we wish them all the luck in the world.
The former Philadelphia Newspapers continues to struggle toward viability. Newspaper Guild employees at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily Newsvoted for a package of wage cuts totaling about 6% in exchange for a year of job security for unionized reporters, editors and advertising staff. The company is also changing its name to the Philadelphia Media Network. The Guild is the first of the paper’s14 unions to agree to terms with the new owners, who bought the paper in a wild and wooly auction in April. With 500 members, though, it’s considered the big cahuna of the negotiation process. The new owners have pledged to keep the Inquirer and Daily News editorial staffs separate and to manage the company for growth.
“Inc. magazine has released its annual list of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the country. Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, only 59 of them are media companies,” writes Lauren Kirchner on the Columbia Journalism Review website. True that, but Kirchner is choosing to take a glass-half-empty perspective. You can turn that statistic around and marvel at the fact that any media companies are on the list. Kirchner does go on to cite a number of interesting media startups that are actually growing and adding people. They aren’t media in the conventional sense, but they do appear to be onto something. This column Is worth reading for the examples alone.
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism gave mainstream media a lukewarm but nonetheless positive endorsement for its coverage of the Gulf oil spill. Noting that the three-months-plus duration of the event challenged news organizations to explain and provide context for the event, Pew said media outlets rose to the challenge under trying conditions. “A news industry coping with depleted staffing, decreasing revenues and shrinking ambition was tested by the oil spill and seemed to pass,” Pew said.

And Finally…

Popular comic strip “Cathy” will end its 34-year run on Oct. 2. Cartoonist Cathy Guisewite, 60, who started the strip as a series of autobiographical doodlings that she sent to her mother, said she wants to spend more time with her family and explore other creative avenues. Cathy was an instant hit in 1976. It struck a chord with the growing number of women who were entering the workforce and struggling to balance career and personal priorities. It currently runs in 1,400 newspapers. In recent years, the strip has been criticized for being dated and even anti-feminist. It’s still clipped to a lot of refrigerators, though.

[…] of the audiences, and trying to reinvent itself.” Newspaper Death Watch’s Paul Gillin called USA Today’s transformation a bellwether for news organizations and said its harmony between news and advertising is a bitter but necessary pill for […]

Regardless of whether you did or didn’t like the changes USA Today made, the fact is that nearly the entire US newspaper industry followed in its footsteps. Full-page weather graphics are now common in metro dailies, story sizes have shrunk considerably and big infographics are part of the landscape. Those are all changes USA Today introduced. Many editors have been dragged kicking and screaming into accepting these changes, but they may have staved off the decline of the industry by several years.

The iPad is merely the latest, and the best, to date, implementation of a technology which takes the concept of the internet and permits its delivery.

The ultimate of which will be a device which allows for delivery without any physical presence intruding into the land/mind-scape. We have still got a long way to go and many toys to build and sell to get there; and get there we will…

But that’s just the nuts and bolts…

The meaningful part of the message is still necessary, and still missing from most social intercourse.

An iPad with nothing on it but McNews is not worth owning.

The saving grace which will arise from the ashes and shredded debris of the old media is that the production and distribution costs of content using the new media are so much lower that communicating this content using McNews production methods will be seen as retro, quaint and cliché, if not just hackneyed.

Marshall McLuhan’s usually misunderstood aphorism that the medium is the message” becomes both true and meaningless when the lines between the media and the message, the content, become blurred and so co-mingled as to become be able to factor themselves out of the equation; when the message overtakes the medium.

I see Eisner is parroting the same wet dream for USA Today that other miopic publishers whine for. Through some unknown and unproven wizadry, users must begin paying for content. That may pull in a slim demographic of politcos and real estate agents, but no one under 30 (the market needed after current readers croak in a c0uple of years) is reading papers at all now, and they aren’t going to pay for an irrelevent product. Hire young, smart executives and send the gray beards out to pasture (see Google’s news strategy written up recently in The Atlantic).

Not that the news could be relevant. But those same editors that were dragged into copying are not using iPhones, they don’t spend full summer days playing World of Warcraft, they can’t understand 3D movies, they don’t drive a car with less than 6 cylinders, they can’t envision a world without brick-and-mortar offices, they feel entitled to expensive perks for all their years of sacrificially learning to use computers, their backs are weak, their eyes are cloudy and they are rooted in the golden era of post-WWII news media.
Dinosaurs.

Posted by Ian

December 10, 2010 @ 7:45 am

[…] there? We think not. The Brenda Starr comic strip will end its 70-year-run on Jan. 2. It joins Cathy on the list of recent comic casualties. Not a good year for female cartoon […]